No one is immune to stress – children encounter stress in situations like preparing for their first day of school or studying for a big test. Stress can be manageable in moderate doses alongside a support system, but prolonged and heightened amounts of stress can be challenging to cope with. 

For children, stress can manifest in transitioning to novel routines, like joining a travel sports team or moving to a different town. Our body’s stress response is a temporary “fight or flight” system and produces many physiological effects, like quickened heart rate and increased oxygen use. Research has shown that the body has three different stress responses–positive, tolerable, and toxic stress responses–with each response differing in how the body responds to stress. The most harmful stress response to children is the toxic stress response, which may occur after having to endure long periods of hardship with little to no support system. Toxic stress may prolong cortisol activation, and makes it difficult to return to a baseline stress level. Toxic stress can disrupt child development, including cognitive development, and can also increase a child’s risk for stress-related diseases. 

Stressors that can lead to toxic stress in children include parental divorce, malnutrition, bullying, loss of a family member, and household disorder. Children experiencing toxic stress may be showing symptoms like little self control, memory difficulty, anxiety, depression, and behavioral abnormalities. The methods for treating toxic stress include several types of therapy, like CBT and child-parent psychotherapy, along with mind-body techniques. Other interventions focus on parents and strengthening the relationship between child and parent. 

Overall, one of the most important aspects of a child’s stress response is having a support system they can rely on. Having loving caregivers can make the world of difference for a child experiencing prolonged periods of stress. 

Kylie Robinshaw

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Read the full article here 

As children grow up and become teenagers, it’s common for them to decrease the frequency at which they talk with their parents and the amount of information they choose to share. Before encouraging your child to open up to you, it is important to know why children may choose to withhold information in the first place. Adolescents may keep information to themselves if they think that it could become material for gossip or if it may incite negative judgment. When children tell you something sensitive, remember that it requires them to become vulnerable and may be something that they prefer to keep private. Further, children may not share stories with their parents out of fear that it might cost them their autonomy or prompt unwanted advice. 

If you have a young child that’s open or maybe an older child that’s beginning to close off, here are a couple of tips for strengthening communication between your child and you. First, be sure that you are making time to regularly engage and interact with your children; an easy way to do this is through family mealtimes, as eating meals as a family creates a setting that encourages conversation. When children share stories with you, make sure you’re not making any assumptions about their behavior or feelings; instead, ask them about their own emotions to better understand how they’re feeling. Further, it’s okay to connect with what your child is sharing and to relate it to your own stories, but ensure that you don’t accidentally steal their thunder, as it may make them feel like their story isn’t as special. 

Finally, children may be upfront about why they aren’t communicating with their parents as much. When this happens, it’s vital to consider what changes you need to make in order to improve communication with your child, as it will ultimately help your child feel more comfortable sharing information with you. 

In all, to encourage open communication with your children, make sure that you’re making time to socialize with them and letting them know that any conversation is welcome. 

Kylie Robinshaw

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Read the full article here

Research has shown that shy children are more susceptible to insecurity, peer pressure, and anxiety, and are likely to be insecure and reserved in adulthood. Encouraging a shy child to break out of their shell can be tough, given the pressure it puts on children to breach their comfort zone. However, when parents take actions that reinforce shyness, it teaches children that they do not need to be independent, which in turn may lead to increased avoidance of uncomfortable situations. 

Nonetheless, shyness in children is fixable through gentle, patient assertiveness. Psychologists suggest encouraging your child to act confident and bold. This can be done by creating a hierarchical series of steps for your child to follow, starting with something that requires a little bit of confidence and ending with something that requires a lot of confidence. Using a modeling technique, where the child would copy your actions, for each step could also prove to be beneficial for building confidence. For example, you could explain that you’re going to say “Hi,” to some friends and enact it with a handshake, and then after seeing how it’s done, the child would do the same. Some activities that you could encourage your child to engage in to help boost their confidence include, participating in class, joining a sports team, and joining clubs at school. 

There’s no set point for how long the process of confidence-building will take, as children who tend to be shyer may require longer periods of guidance. Further, moments of failure should be expected and accepted while your child works past their shyness; failure, nonetheless, is beneficial as it shows your child that while embarrassing moments happen, life goes on. Overall, the process of helping your child work through their shyness is a fulfilling process that will produce lasting benefits.

Kylie Robinshaw

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Read the full article here

Developing research is showing that children have an easier time navigating their environment when it’s predictable, and that unpredictable environments may affect their brain development and mental health. Predictability provides multiple benefits to growing children, one of which is establishing relationships with caregivers. Having a predictable routine with caregivers allows children to develop trust, and supports brain areas involved in emotional regulation. Child and adult brains thrive on predictable situations, as they provide us safe routines, whereas unpredictable events can be stressful. Here’s some tips on how to make your child’s environment more predictable to support their development: 

1. Develop a bedtime routine. Bedtime routines prepare the brain for sleep, and having a consistent, predictable set of procedures to complete ahead of going to bed makes it more likely for children to sleep successfully. Bedtime routines can be as simple as having dinner, washing up, brushing teeth, changing into pajamas, and then going to sleep. 
2. Eat as a family. Having a meal as a family provides children with the opportunity to connect and build secure relationships with their loved ones. 
3. Do something fun at the end of the week. Concluding the week with something fun, like going to the park, watching a movie, or having a Pizza night marks the end of the week and facilitates shifting to the weekend routine. 
4. Give your child a heads up before a transition occurs. It can be hard for children to transition between tasks, especially when they are engaged in a fun activity. Given how much children thrive off of predictability, let them know ahead of time the next task they’ll be transitioning to. This will make the transition easier since it gives a child’s brain time to prepare for another task. 
5. Let your child know about any changes in their routine. Following a routine all the time is unfeasible; sometimes, a change in a routine is needed when appointments, travel and the holidays come up. Changes in routine help children learn about how to be flexible and how to cope with change. Letting children know about any routine changes in advance can help them organize their emotions regarding the change. 

Overall, developing routines with children supports their brain development and also helps them practice mental flexibility.

Kylie Robinshaw

UConn KIDS, Research Assistant

Read more here

Being creative is a central part of life for children and their development. Children are able to manifest their creativity in a variety of ways, like drawing, building, and playing pretend. Parents can utilize the following strategies to help encourage their children to express their creativity.

1. Provide your child with opportunities to do arts and crafts. Arts and crafts can be done at any age, and can range from something simple to something complex. Some fun art activities that your child can do include carving something out of clay, making friendship bracelets, making a spaceship out of a cardboard box, and sewing. 
2. Limit screen time. Screen time can take up a lot of time out of a child’s day. A study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that children spend a daily average of about 7.5 hours looking at screens. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry recommends limiting screen time for children, suggesting no more than 1-3 hours of screen time for children aged 2 to 5 years old. Turning down the amount of screen time a child has can help encourage them to have fun and relax, and allows them to pursue and try out creative activities. 
3. Put time aside for imaginative play. Imaginative play includes any time of make-believe play, like playing with figurines or playing dress-up. Parents can also tap into their inner child and engage in pretend play with their children to encourage their creativity.

Some final tips to help foster your child’s creativity include allowing messes to happen, praising and displaying your children’s projects, and allowing your child to experiment. Encouraging your child’s creativity can help your child grow emotional and critical thinking skills, and also produces other benefits like stress reduction and identity exploration. Creativity can also help boost self-esteem within children and facilitate their fine motor skill development. Children are intrinsically creative due to their curious drive to explore about the world, and providing children resources to pursue their creativity can assist their development and promote their cognitive well-being.

Kylie Robinshaw

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Read the full article here

A child’s sense of humor can indicate a lot about their development and thought processes. What children find funny oftentimes coincides with their developmental stage; for example, toddlers who are learning potty training find humor in “potty talk,” while older children who have already learned potty training don’t think bathroom jokes are funny. 

Laughing and smiling appear to be innate human behaviors, with infants as young as twelve-hours old being able to smile and babies who are only a couple of months old knowing how to laugh. One prime aspect of infant development is realizing that they are their own person and acquiring object permanence, which is the understanding that people and objects still exist even when they are out-of-sight. Object permanence acquisition begins when a baby is around eight-months-old. During this stage of development, many babies find humor in the game peekaboo, where someone hides their face behind their hands, opens their hands and says “peekaboo!” A baby with object permanence finds peekaboo funny because they understand the game, and the fact that someone they know is behind the hands. Peekaboo can be a game of prediction for infants acquiring object permanence; they know a familiar face is hiding, they predict that the face will reappear, and feel relief when it does. 

This same concept applies to many other stages of cognitive development; two-year-olds who are learning language find gibberish talk funny because they are in the process of grasping their language and understand that gibberish is nonsense. In the same sense, when six-year-olds are comprehending logic and abstraction, they find humor in jokes that involve word-play, logical flaws and juxtapositions, like “What’s the best month for a parade?” “March,” as these jokes reflect their current cognitive development. 

Overall, the next time you’re wondering about what your child is learning about themselves and the world, look to the source of their laughter, as a child’s sense of humor often concurs with their development. 

Kylie Robinshaw

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Read the full article here

Today’s Friday Feature is Sumita Saluja!

Sumita is a Project Manager and Research Assistant within the Department of Educational Psychology at UConn. She earned her degree in Health Sciences at the University of Hartford. 

Sumita and her research team are hoping to learn which areas of the brain are involved in successful reading development. This will help them better understand the neurobiological effects of teaching reading on a neural level. They are also hoping to learn how the brain changes as they teach students with reading difficulty to read using a research-based reading program. Sumita’s goal within her research is to create very efficient and effective reading interventions that work well for students with reading difficulty.

In her free time, Sumita likes to spend time with friends and family, especially her 15-year-old son. She enjoys sports, the stock market, and Netflix! 

 

Many children are picky eaters in that they are very selective about the foods they consume. Picky eating can vary on a spectrum from having mild to severe food preferences, with the latter being classified as avoidant food intake disorder (ARFID) due to the weight loss and malnutrition that it can cause. It is normal for children aged 2-5 years old to go through phases of being a picky eater, but some children get caught in this habit and only want to eat specific foods, which can result in weight changes for the child and increased demands on the parent. 

Picky eating in children can be caused by a variety of things, including mental health disorders such as anxiety, developmental and behavioral disorders, sensory sensitivities, having bad experiences with food, and feeding difficulty. Picky eating may often be brushed off as a non-issue, but it can put children at risk for nutritional deficiencies. Nonetheless, picky eating is resolvable; psychologists recommend these five tips for helping children overcome their selective eating patterns. 

First, understand that picky eating results from food anxiety; the child does not enjoy eating new foods and picky eating helps them cope. Second, do not coerce or make your child eat foods that they don’t want to eat. Allowing your child to choose what foods to consume decreases pressure to eat, and in turn allows them to eat better. Third, begin to provide your child with new food experiences to help relieve food anxiety. For example, you could take them to the grocery store with you and teach them about new foods. Fourth, consider making a change to how you present meals to your child. A common method of feeding picky eaters is providing them a different meal at a time separate from when the rest of the family eats. This method can isolate a child and decreases their exposure to different foods. Instead, consider using a family meal approach, where a couple of dishes are prepared and served buffet-style. This approach allows the family to eat the same foods together, and grants picky eaters choice as well. Lastly, set boundaries around eating, such as how long meals should last or whether electronics are allowed at the table.

Helping a child overcome picky eating is a family effort that requires patience, but overall is a worthwhile process that in the end can improve your child’s nutritional health.

Kylie Robinshaw

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Article Link: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ask-child-psychologist/202211/how-do-i-get-my-picky-eater-try-new-foods

Halloween is a time for children to have fun, dress up, and experience many tricks and treats. However, a lot of Halloween tricks, costumes, and decorations can understandably be scary and anxiety-inducing for children. Five percent of children and adolescents have a specific phobia, with some children suffering from “maskaphobia,” a phobia of people wearing costumes and masks. Children who are scared of Halloween episodes of their favorite TV shows, of walking around a Halloween store, or of just seeing people dressed up in costumes, in general, may struggle with celebrating Halloween. Psychologists suggest the following tips when helping children overcome their Halloween fears. 

First and foremost, know that it’s normal for preschool-aged children to be afraid of costumes and masks; most children will grow out of this fear when they are in elementary school.

Second, know your child’s goals when it comes to Halloween and why they want to celebrate it. Knowing these goals can help guide you in helping your child combat their fears.

Third, ask your child questions about their fears like, “When you see ____, what goes on in your mind?” Using identifying questions helps you pinpoint the cause behind your child’s worries and can prepare you for helping them cope.

Fourth, help your child prepare for trick-or-treating by buying your own costume. Gradually introducing the costume to your child through steps such as having them help pick it out and letting them play with it and try it on can help them feel comfortable with the costumes they’ll see on Halloween.

Lastly, on Halloween night, let your child abide by their own comfort levels and reassure them of your confidence in them. Acknowledging your child’s courage reinforces their bravery and can give them the push they need to overcome their fears. 

Kylie Robinshaw

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Article Link: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/emotionally-hardy-children-and-families/202210/what-do-when-your-child-is-afraid-halloween-and

Our emotions allow us to connect with others and make sense of the world around us; they are a central part of our life. During childhood, our emotions may control us more than we control them. When children don’t know how to navigate their emotions they may end up repressing them or seeking out harmful coping outlets, both of which can have negative impacts on their physical and mental health. This is why it’s important to teach children how to manage their emotions properly. 

One way to show children how to regulate their emotions is to model it yourself. Children watch people around them for cues on what behaviors to emulate, so they are likely to pick up on healthy emotion regulation techniques if they see someone else using them. So, the next time you are angry or upset in the vicinity of your child, try taking deep breaths or using other self-regulation mechanisms, and chances are your child will begin using them too. When your child is feeling upset it is also important to use empathy and validate their emotions. Acknowledging your child’s feelings through using statements that reflect their emotions like, “You seem angry,” helps them feel recognized. Showing your child that you are there for them and value their feelings helps them begin the process of expressing, rather than repressing, their feelings. 

It is also important to recognize that emotions cannot be limited; let your child feel their “bad” emotions, but teach them that emotions and actions can be separate. Instead of telling your child to calm down, try teaching them coping mechanisms for their emotions instead. Further, it can be hard to tell what a child is feeling at times. Having them talk their emotions out to you can help you understand their emotional triggers, and helps them sort through their feelings as well. 

Lastly, teach your child how to find and recognize emotional outlets. Using an emotional outlet, like writing, dancing, or exercising, can be a form of self-expression and can help your child regulate their emotions, and can also be a useful tool for self-expression and socialization.

Kylie Robinshaw

Research Assistant, UConn KIDS

Article Link: https://psychcentral.com/blog/helping-children-learn-how-to-manage-emotions#1